Said the college professor, secretly videoed by a student in the back row, now playing on YouTube, linked by Twitchy.
And I say: Look out all you professors. Anything you say may be taken out of context and posted on YouTube. Your hyperbole and casual humor and reenactments of the arguments of others will look quite different as the world looks over the shoulders of the captive audience you think you're talking at. The back row is no longer the back row. There are a million more rows behind that, full of people with no motive to act like they respect you.
And by the way, if you live in Wisconsin and are at least 60 years old, you have a legislature-given privilege to attend — free of tuition — classes at the University of Wisconsin.
Welcome to the future. Feel free to rant about the Panopticon wherein you find yourselves, but please at least notice you are here.
I feel like recording myself teaching and taking my own quotes out of context, as I paraphrase some argument that's made in a case, putting it in starker words to reveal problems lurking within the carefully framed language of lawyers and judges. I'd like to demonstrate how easy it would be to make me sound like a monster. (And I'm saying that partly to inoculate myself! I've got paraphrase paranoia.)
The man in the video — which I chose not to embed — is said to be a creative writing teacher. Who knows what he was up to? Maybe cranking the kids up, trying to get juices flowing. Come on, somebody, get angry. Look alive.
It's an old game. Waking up the students, but the professors need to wake up. Those students who look sleepy and blank to you all have videophones and they may be wide awake and 10 steps ahead of you.
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